Authors: Daniela Giannetti, Luca Pinto and Andrea Pedrazzani Published: Political Studies, forthcoming 2015. Abstract: Compared to other aspects of agenda control, the organisation of legislative calendars has received scarce scholarly attention. However, setting the floor timetable affects parliament’s decisions and may therefore become crucial for understanding the policy-making process better. This article examines the allocation […] Read more – ‘Setting Parliamentary Calendars: How Parties Allocate Time for Plenary Debates on Bills’.

Author: Andrea Ceron (2013) , Published: Party Politics, doi:10.1177/1354068812472581 Sanctions and homogeneity of intra-party preferences are the two main pathways to party unity in roll-call votes. However, only a few works have managed to properly measure the degree of polarization within the party, and therefore the link between ideological preferences and parliamentary voting behaviour has not yet been […] Read more – ‘’.

The Italian Legislative Speech Dataset (ILSD) A project by Luigi Curini, Andrea Ceron and Paolo Martelli What is ILSD? The Italian Legislative Speech Dataset (ILSD) is based upon a content analysis of all the investiture debates preceding the vote of confidence in the Italian Chamber of Deputies from 1946 to 2013. The coding scheme of the dataset follows the same […] Read more – ‘The Italian Legislative Speech Dataset (ILSD) is online!’.

Authors: Curini Luigi, and Francesco Zucchini. Published: forthcoming in European Political Science Review The role played by legislative committees in parliamentary democracies is directly related to some of their properties. In particular cohesion, namely similarity of committee members’ preferences, is the most important non-institutional feature that influences committee working. This non-institutional aspect, on its turn, is directly […] Read more – ‘The institutional foundations of committee cohesion in a (changing) parliamentary democracy’.

Authors: Andrea Pedrazzani and Francesco Zucchini Published: European Journal of Political Research, 52(2):687–714(2013) Scholars interested in legislative processes pay relatively little attention to the changes made to bills in parliamentary democracies. On the one hand, comparative research has often described parliamentary institutions as ineffectual vis-à-vis cabinets throughout the lawmaking process; on the other hand, for a long […] Read more – ‘Horses and hippos: why Italian government bills change in the legislative arena (1987-2006)’.

Author: Licia Claudia Papavero, Francesco Zucchini Studies on female legislative behavior suggest that when introducing and/or approving a feminist agenda is at stake, women parliamentarians may challenge party cohesion by allying across party lines (Swers 2002; Sanbonmatsu 2006). However, evidence is mixed (see for example Lloren 2011), and how and why gender cohesion within the legislature […] Read more – ‘A gendered spatial analysis of legislative preferences in the Italian parliament’.

Authors: Enrico Borghetto and Marco Giuliani Published: South European Society and Politics 17(1): 23–44 (2012) The Italian legislature does not enjoy widespread trust. At least one of the reasons has to be the perception of its inefficiency. Comparatively, the Italian law-making process is slow and most policy-makers complain about the difficulties experienced in trying to […] Read more – ‘A Long Way to Tipperary: Time in the Italian Legislative Process 1987–2008’.

Author: Francesco Zucchini Published: European Journal of Political Research 50(6): 749–774 (2011) Recent studies of the legislative process have put forward a number of plausible hypotheses regarding the distribution of agenda-setting power. These hypotheses have guided scholars in identifying those conflicts and actors that are crucial to explaining legislative change and the wording of legislation. […] Read more – ‘Government alternation and legislative agenda setting’.

Author: Francesco Zucchini Published: The Role Of Governments in Legislative Agenda Setting, eds. Bjørn Erik Rasch and George Tsebelis. London: Routledge, p. 53–77 (2011) Italian governance has gone through a political and institutional upheaval in the last sixteen years. At present, Italian governments seem to play a stronger role in legislative agenda setting. First, this […] Read more – ‘Italy: Government alternation and legislative agenda setting’.

Author: Francesco Zucchini Published: South European Society and Politics 13(1): 111 – 115 (2008) The articles included in this issue display a healthy scepticism towards any naïve parallelism between the changes in the party system, the electoral rules or political communication, and the changes that have taken place in the legislative process. The former are […] Read more – ‘An Afterword – But Not the Last Word’.

Author: Marco Giuliani Published: South European Society and Politics 13(1): 61 – 85 (2008) The transformation of the Italian political system, which began in the early 1990s, should have had an impact upon internal parliamentary dynamics, and in particular upon the degree of consensualism within the legislative process. In this article we are going to […] Read more – ‘Patterns of Consensual Law-making in the Italian Parliament’.

Author: Francesco Zucchini Published: Rivista italiana di Politiche Pubbliche (3): 57–98 (2005) This article aims both to review the crucial features of the principal-agent framework and to show its utility for the research on the legislative process. The principal’s attempt to minimize the agency loss in a unidimensional policy space can explain why some delegation […] Read more – ‘Teoria della delega e leggi. Cenni introduttivi ed esempi di applicazione’.

Author: Marco Giuliani Published: Rivista italiana di Politiche Pubbliche 2005(3): 15–55 (2005) There have been different seasons in the analysis of the Italian parliament and its legislative process, each one characterised by peculiar research questions. While «growing older», this field of inquiry has increasingly relied, both in its quantitative and qualitative variations, on some standardized […] Read more – ‘Il senso del limite. Problemi aperti nell’analisi del legislativo’.

Authors: Giliberto Capano and Marco Giuliani Published: Journal of Legislative Studies 9(2): 8–34 (2003) The consolidation of Italian democracy dates back to the early 1950s. This half-century – a rather long period compared to the other Southern European countries – is now traditionally perceived as being composed of two different time intervals. The first 40 […] Read more – ‘The Italian parliament: In search of a new role?’.

Author: Francesco Zucchini Published: Rivista italiana di scienza politica (1): 109–138 (2001) Most studies of the Italian parliament during the so called First Republic try to explain the permanent characteristics of legislative output. Scholars trying to account for the change usually interpret it as the complete fullfilment of structural factors operating since the beginning of […] Read more – ‘Veto players’ e interazione fra esecutivo e legislativo: il caso italiano’.

Authors: Giliberto Capano and Marco Giuliani Published: Journal of Legislative Studies 7(4): 13–36 (2001) Almost 25 years ago, Di Palma portrayed the Italian political system as one in which parties, executives and political élites survived without governing. Much of his interpretation was based upon a careful empirical investigation of the actual functioning of the legislative […] Read more – ‘Governing without Surviving? An Italian paradox: law-making in Italy 1987-2001’.

Author: Marco Giuliani Published: South European Society and Politics 2(1): 66–96 (1997) This article has three different aims. Firstly, to identify the distinguishing features of Italianconsociativismo, contrasting them with the characteristics of Lijphart’s consociational democracies. Secondly, to introduce the main hypotheses which have been advanced in the literature to interpret this phenomenon; and thirdly to […] Read more – ‘Measures of consensual law-making: Italian ‘consociativismo’’.